MISSISSIPPI
Last night at a Love’s
truck stop, a man
told me he would like
to slice me up,
boil and eat my liver
and rape me after,
I’m pretty sure,
in that order.
With his eyes
he spoke those words,
and if you don’t
believe me
(“How could you know
for sure?”)
then you’ve never been
a woman, or else.
The rain and the cows
don’t care.
The corn doesn’t
ask or doubt.
And there’s
a southern sadness
buried in everything
I pass down this dark
road driving tonight.
§
ROOT DEEP
What is this not wanting to exist
that comes knocking more and more,
And why is saying this with words more or
less effective than drawing it with the lines
of forgotten songs?
Life is transient, but we must not say so—
Life is filled with ill-gotten gains, but we must not query
what is often sourced from who we are born as
and heritage lines that trace and hold
culture and kin to market profits. I work to kill that future.
We are a becoming.
I’m made of old lightning.
Even the dead grass rises
for a day, maybe two.
The shit of me is no more than the good of me.
Remember that when I’m home
I’ll fly into myself, a home’s
reverse mortgage for this indebted soul
I’ve been nurturing, the sea beside me a gaping wound
reflecting my product-enhanced days, daily deaths
worth nothing less than the measure of plastics
that enter and last beyond us.
I don’t deserve tattoos that reflect the worth
of humanity’s coolest underbelly:
Engrave me with chemical weapons
because my god my good president is a shining example
of the control we gave up
the minute we let the cops shoot Wilson in the back &
the courts walk George over Trayvon out
without raising arms refusing everything.
§
MODERN LOVE STORY
Massage the inside of my bones:
I need to go high with unchained birds,
so I take these nails from my coffin
and raise them to the dead’s
succession.
To the man over there who loves his wife
and thinks gay is okay for strangers. Has
five children,
Who takes such liberties as to populate a planet
with varied offspring?
Turning, the pierced bull goes feminine,
twins the star
that follows her progress of torture
from the sky
and butterflies the dust around her sober.
She awakens years later in the subway
of Grand Central station,
hand in the hand of another woman
who she has become in the stall
of public restrooms. It reminds her
of her life before where life was banned by her father.
It is good to be reborn, she says, so she gives
the world her story:
I was told to give life a purpose.
What if I am the stonewall
in abandoned woods, beautiful and utterly useless?
I am that today.